How to Boost Color and Adjust Clarity in Wedding Photography Edits

Color and clarity adjustments can be found under the Basic editing panel under Presence. Boosting the color and clarity are often the final editing touches and can bring a lot of life to a picture (boosting the color, especially). Here are the different Presence controls and how to use them:

Clarity: The Clarity feature makes an image sharper or softer by adding or taking away localized contrast to the mid-tones. It can be a wonderful tool to use when you have a slightly out-of-focus image, because adding some clarity can give the illusion of a sharper picture. To add clarity, move the slider to the right; to decrease clarity, move the slider to the left.

Vibrance: The Vibrance feature evaluates the saturation of color in an image and only boosts the intensity of the colors that are muted. Using this tool can be especially helpful when editing photos of people, because it allows you to boost the colors around your subject while preserving the natural skin tones.

Saturation: The Saturation feature treats all colors in an image equally and bumps up the intensity of all the colors if you move the slider to the right. It decreases the saturation of all colors if you move it to the left.

The Vibrance feature used in the image on the top increased only the more muted colors; the image on the bottom, on the other hand, used the Saturation feature, and some of its colors wound up too vibrant (like the greens and the skin tones).

If at any point during the editing process you’d like to compare your edits to your original picture, simply click on the rectangular box with two Ys side by side, found at the bottom left of your image. Lightroom brings up a Before and After look so you can see how your picture is progressing.